Software developers typically design software using English as a standard language for user interaction. Software developers face an increasingly challenging task of making the same software usable to different users around the world. To accomplish this, software should be adaptable to regional differences such as language, customs, formats, currencies, etc. Localization involves making software configurable to the region, language or other characteristic.
A localization process broadly involves separating the language or region specific information into a locale file or data-store. Thereafter, either in-house or third party language translators prepare sets of language or region specific locales. The localization process builds a set of locales that are included in the software. When the user executes the software, he or she selects the region or other characteristics to adapt the software. Based on this selection, the software uses an appropriate pre-build and includes locale data for user interaction. Thus, different users around the world with varying requirements can use the same software package in a similar manner.
A typical modern software application may include a set of program files, data files and image files. Localization efforts generally focus on the application elements or properties such as interaction text, menus, labels, error messages, prompts, images, etc., that require the software to adapt to a user desired interface.
A localization process requires inputs from translators who translate messages to build locale-specific information. The translators may be either in-house, user supplied or external agencies. Software developers should work in tandem with translators. However, it may be a challenging task to coordinate the original information and translated information. For example, developers may be making changes to software while the translation process is in progress. Further, the development and translation cycle may undergo several iterations including correction and checking. It can be an arduous task to manually catalogue, i.e., manually synchronize the software development cycle with the localization cycle.
A known technique of cataloguing allows searching of image files using tracking text files similar to JAVA's PropertyResourceBundle. However, this approach suffers from the having to link the image files and text-files that track the image files.